Consciousness
Today's blog is a response to a recent article (July 28, 2021) by Daniel Burke published in Tricycle on the the first-ever scientific study of post-mortem meditation, still under way with the umbrella title of The Thukdam Project. Here is the URL for the context:
“...where, exactly, is consciousness located?” is a question being asked by near innumerable inquirers. So many from so many disciplines and interests that this emerging arena is one that makes this old interdisciplinarian celebrate, even as the question is driving others to the bars before five o'clock. My own brief, simplistic take is below:
The question “...where, exactly, is consciousness located?” is what I've come to term an ontoepistemological problem. That is to say, the way the question is posed blocks pursuit of the answer. It seems increasingly clear from the work of David Bohm and many others inside science and outside (Krishnamurti) its narrow parameters that consciousness may not have a “where.” Gertrude Stein offered a clue with her flip comment about Oakland, California that there was no there, there. A reference to a physical disappearance over time of a once real (ontological) place. Consciousness may not have a “where,” as it is likely “every where.” Which is also to say that it may well not be physical as in the material/particle/ measurable sense. This is the problem with the presupposition in the scientific apparatus “if it can't be measured, it doesn't exist.” This objection is one Bohm was working on which likely was part of the motive for his collegial marginalization. Ontologically, consciousness seems a rather obvious reality, but to insist that it must be an expression of material particles like ions moving inside a brain case, is to fall in to an epistemological dark well. The means by which we answer such questions usually determines the answer as it is posed, hence, there is no separation twixt ontology and epistemology notwithstanding historical attempts to maintain it. More and more we are persuaded, as was Bohm, that the brain, like every other cell (a loose term, admittedly) in every “thing” in the universe is interconnected with every other “thing.” It appears to be a quantum problem.
Like “dark matter” consciousness may be a form of energy about which the clues are metaphoric. In Eastern/Asian philosophy, form and substance, while “real” are not at all the same “thing.” Substance equates with “thing-ness” while form does not. Yet they arise mutually from the causal, insubstantial, immeasurable form. Lao Tzu gave us the metaphoric distinction of Yin (form) as “the mother of the 10,000 things (Yang) (my parens). Yin would allow consciousness to be formless and ubiquitous, while Yang scrambles mightily for the symbols with which to put it into a box.